"Therefore, omit no watchfulness, diligence, care, and effort, in order to 'guard the deposit' of Christ's teaching whose destruction has been planned, as you know, by a great conspiracy." – Pope Pius VII, Diu Satis, May 15, 1800

Lets go back a bit to the summer before Louis XVI was murdered. I was reading something in Jacques Crétinaeu-Joly’s marvelous work L’Église Romaine en Face de la Révolution and a light went off in my brain. It is merely a footnote wherein Crétineau-Joly reproduces a decree issued by the consul general of the commune of Nantes on the Atlantic Ocean during the September massacres of 1792. First I’ll give a little a background on the first of what would be many massacres of priests in this miserable epoch we have lived through.

In brief: the nations of Europe were becoming highly concerned about events in France and tried to force the issue and failed. The Prussians sent their army into France and at first made great headway, advancing toward Paris with the intention of ending the coup d’état and restoring Louis XVI to his rightful place as king.

As they advanced great convulsions occurred within the revolutionary regime. The National Assembly dissolved itself and was reborn as the National Convention that I mentioned in the last post. In the interim every opponent of the Masonic coup d’état was branded a traitor to the nation and assaulted. Groups of fanatics led by Marat (a known Freemason) and Robespierre set on a course of public murder starting on September 2, 1792.

Priests who had refused to take the oath prescribed by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that would have required them to renounce their fealty to the Roman Pontiff were quite literally thrown to the wolves. They were ‘tried’ in their prisons and then thrown outside the gate of the prison to a waiting frenzied crowd egged on by fanatics who were hell bent on making sure that their enemies got the blame for the national disaster they themselves had created. The crowd then hewed them to pieces and the streets ran with the blood of these martyrs. Thus was born the age of tolerance.

It was in this context that the following decree was issued by the consul general of Nantes on September 6, 1792. I will offer my own translation of a couple of excerpted paragraphs here (parentheses mine):

The consul, considering that the danger which threatens the fatherland and the misfortunes to which it is today exposed are in part the effect and the result of the criminal maneuvers of the non swearing priests; that it is obvious that these men have sworn the ruin of their fatherland, and that no consideration will ever rally them to the cause of liberty and equality (again no fraternity)…

From tomorrow the commissioners (les commissaires, if that word reminds you of another title given by another regime in another place 125 years later) of the three administrations will go to the seminary and to the chateau of Nantes, where the non swearing priests or ecclesiastics of this département are detained who are there either by their own good will or who have been driven there by armed force, and notify them of the law of August 26 (where they were required to swear the oath or face punishment), which decrees their deportation and and enjoin them to be prepared to quit the kingdom in the time fixed by the said law.

The commissioners will make these ecclesiastics understand that the administrators are disposed to follow the literal execution of the decree of of August 26 with regard to them; but that the fermentation of spirits is such that it would be on their part a great imprudence to relocate to the interior and that the safest for them is to prefer the way of the sea (i.e. leave France) to take them any place they wish to fix their domicile.

The commissioners will declare to these ecclesiastics that they must decide within twenty four hours, at the end of which they will come to receive their declarations. Time presses and their safety would be compromised by a long delay.

This is a threat. This so called ‘consul general’ is saying to the faithful priests: either get out or we will throw you to the pikes like what happened to your brothers in Paris. But that was not my thought when I read it. My thought was that I had seen this before somewhere. This wasn’t new; in fact it had already happened in another time and a place, but where? Then I remembered.

Lets think back twenty five years earlier April 2, 1767 when all of the sudden out of nowhere armed royal messengers from the king of Spain, Charles III, arrived at every Jesuit house in his vast realm. For reasons never explained to them Jesuits of all ages were driven from their houses with nothing but the clothes on their back and a breviary and marched to the sea. There they were put on ships and after a long ocean journey they were to be unceremoniously dumped on the shore of the Papal States in Italy.

Charles III never made public the reason for this deportation and it was never revealed who planned and organized its method. It was so well organized and so well planned that it must have had some sort of administrator. Who was it? What associations did this person have? This was in fact the focal point of the whole suppression conspiracy. The instantaneous annihilation of the Church’s most potent religious order from the whole of the vast Spanish empire. And now it was being repeated, but being applied to the whole of the French clergy. Who was behind this?

All those Jesuits being marched to the sea were but a precursor and a foreshadowing. Not just of what happened in France in 1792, but of the Soviet march to the gulag and the Nazi trains to the death camps and the sadder sight of might have been mothers being goaded into abortion ‘clinics’. First the Jesuits, then the priests, then the whole Church, then the whole people, then humanity itself. Or maybe this is all just a coincidence?

Please go to Confession and pray three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Nine months after the murder of King Louis XVI in the Place de la Révolution and scarcely a week after the murder of his wife Queen Marie Antoinette the revolutionary government of France, the National Convention, adopted a very new and a very strange calendar on October 24, 1793.

The start of this calendar was to be and its reference point was to be September 22, 1792 the day on which the French Republic was declared. The reference point for that most Catholic of countries would no longer be the birth of Jesus Christ, the advent of the Eternal Word made flesh, the coming of the Divine Redeemer of mankind. No, it was instead going to be the birthday of that disastrously ill-fated république.

But that was not the strangest part. The seven day week was abolished. Instead each month of thirty days was to be divided into three décades. So in effect instead of seven days the week was now ten, with the tenth being a day of rest and/or government approved worship of human reason or of some unknown unnamed ‘supreme being.’

The implications of this are obvious. The six days of creation and the seventh day of rest were to be eliminated from human memory. And the first day of the week the day of the Resurrection, Sunday, was just simply to disappear. The chief architect of the calendar Charles Gilbert-Romme said as much at the time. When asked what the object of his calendar was Romme simply replied (The French Revolution, Gaxotte, 1932, p. 329):

To abolish Sunday.

After Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the revolutionary government and reestablished a still somewhat shaky relationship with the Catholic Church this calendar receded and was finally done away with on January 1, 1806. But where did it come from?

I recently ran across an image of a pamphlet here published by the Convention in either 1793 or 1794 concerning the republican calendar that may help us to answer that question:

Note the upside down triangle. What a curious symbol! And not one that we would typically associate with the French Revolution. The equilateral triangle however has been, and remains, a very prominent occult symbol of Freemasonry.

And the words written in the triangle. The Convention representing the regime followed by two words: liberté and égalité. But what about fraternité? It wasn’t there. The self-contradictory ideals of complete and total personal liberty and complete and total collective equality which cannot coexist; the striving for both of which at the same time causes a society to rip itself to pieces which was then and remains the goal of this conspiracy.

There was no fraternité. That was added later by the French people when they had to reimagine things to make sense of the crimes that had been committed in their name on their land. Real brotherhood both within and among nations only comes via the Catholic Church who by her Sacraments and Teaching heals the wounds of fallen man and curbs his passions and worst instincts.

Please go to Confession and say three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

One of the striking things about the French Revolution that is often left undiscussed in our time is the immediacy of the attack on the institutions of the Catholic Church in France. From the very start in the summer of 1789 those who had seized control of the institutions of the French state used that power to assault the Catholic Church and deprive her of the means to survive in that country. This gives the lie to any notion that this coup d’état ever had anything to do with the welfare of the French people. This was all about ideology and using the institutions of the French state to attack the Church and this attack began immediately. Here is a timeline:

August 4, 1789 (only three weeks after the storming of the Bastille): tithes are abolished

September 27, 1789: sacred vessels are seized

October 18, 1789: monastic vows are abolished

November 2, 1789: The French nation is declared proprietor of all Church property

April 13, 1790: Total nationalization of all Church property

The usual explanation for this is that the treasury of the French monarchy was in dire straits after it had been seduced into financing the Masonic inspired revolt in North America against the British crown a decade before. While there is some truth in this that explanation is nowhere near complete.

All of these measures were implemented tyrannically and with no negotiation. The Church was not asked to help the supposedly crippled French economy. She was not asked to contribute to improving the welfare of the French people. Her property was just seized out of hand. Her ancient religious orders were disbanded and their vows that were between the monk or none and the Church and the community and God alone were suddenly abrogated by this National Assembly that got its authority from where?

And how did any of this help the French people? It did not. It simply was an attempt to institutionally disembowel the Church in France. But the way to this madness had been prepared by Voltaire and his minions and others for decades prior to this coup d’état as we have shown in our previous posts.

All of this madness would be institutionalized in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790. The Pope was functionally removed as head of the Church of France. Bishops were to be elected by all inhabitants of the Bishop’s départment whether Christian or not. This new French church filled with apostate priests would simply be an arm of the conspiracy that had seized the French state. Or that seems to have been the plan. It should be said that many many many priests did not apostasize and were cruelly persecuted for it resulting in many many martyrdoms. And just one more time absolutely none of this had anything to do with more liberty, equality, or fraternity for the French people. And the fact that it started immediately gives a strong indication that it was all pre-planned by somebody.

Please go to Confession and pray three Hail Mary’s in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I was reading Jacques Crétineau-Joly’s marvelous though sadly never translated into English work L’Église Romaine en Face de la Revolution from 1859 about the disastrous calamities in Europe that both caused and resulted from the French Revolution and I came across a fascinating passage about the state of France between 1789 and the massacres of the fall of 1792 (translation and italics mine):

In each city there exists a (political) club and this club writes a daily newspaper. To the aid of these two new mechanisms there is formed an electric current throughout France which propagates enthusiasm or fear, and which metes out hope or disappointments according to its pleasure. They want to lead the French nation by degrees to repudiate her history and her cult on her own. They blow into the hive to enrage the bees.

I have never read a more cogent analysis of the destructive power of mass media than this; and it was written in 1859! The printing press had existed for a third of a millennium when the French Revolution broke out, and it had been used to bad effect by the Protestants and by Voltaire and his cronies with the licentious and pornographic publications they spread throughout Europe to weaken the wills of the societies that their disciples were now starting to assault but it had never been used quite like this. Its purpose now was not simply to spread bad ideas but to control public opinion.

This was a first in human history to my knowledge. The information flow was to be managed. Certainly spreading rumors, especially in wartime, was an ancient tactic but it was usually local and only by word of mouth. And newspapers had existed prior to 1789 but they were different: usually just a summary of grain prices, court cases, ship arrivals, and if any foreign news were included it was usually only because someone had sent a letter with some interesting factoids from a foreign port. In the times when kings and their courts managed the affairs of state there was a lot less for people to worry about.

The revolution of 1789 claimed to launch the people, the French nation, into the halls of government. And it created mechanisms such as an elected National Assembly that would be the vehicle for this supposed popular control. The only hitch in this project was that the real revolutionaries had no interest in the actual will of the people. Most of the people after six weeks of revolutionary government probably would have sought to return to a time of more peace and stability and prosperity with the old institutions firmly in charge, only maybe a little bit less corrupt, though it should be said that corruption is a constant throughout human history no matter what form of government one lives under. In fact corruption has amplified exponentially in the so called ‘democratic age’ compared to what it was under the Catholic monarchs.

Now the will of the people had first to be constructed, for who could say that the 28 million souls who inhabited France in 1789 possessed a single will between them, and then molded to suit the preferences of the revolutionaries. This is why the construction of this network of political associations who were producing their own publications all linked to a central authority was so crucial. People in Bordeaux and in Marseille and in Lille would all be reading the same thing day in and day out. Public opinion would not simply be managed it would be constructed. I must also say that this network of political clubs and their publications is suspiciously similar to the network of Masonic lodges that existed throughout France during the years and decades prior to the Revolution. Just saying it for the record.

With this information highway firmly under the control of the revolutionaries they were free to first exalt certain characters who served their agenda and demolish those who were opposed, sometimes the same person. They were free to create false hopes and then dash those hopes AND give people someone to blame when those hopes did not materialize. This was all new in 1789 and it appeared on the scene so fast that the French people had no defense against being manipulated like this. Even today people can’t seem to figure out that 95% of what goes on in the media is designed to manipulate them into becoming servants of an agenda. They never seem to get the fact that the way the media is structured even in the internet age allows it to be dominated by a very few whose names we will likely never know. Some days I think that the modern mass media is that river coming out of the serpent’s mouth in chapter 12 of the Apocalypse.

Please go to Confession and pray three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

It is hard to underestimate the change that occurred in the outlook of the human race at the end of the eighteenth century. Prior to that moment, for all of recorded history, the divine had been at the center of human existence. Even if cultures or peoples of bygone eras had ignorant or mistaken notions of who God is never in their wildest dreams would they have ever even thought of moving the divine out of the center place of their lives much less doing away with any thought of a God. It would not have made any sense to them to do so, for they were not yet stupid enough to forget that man did not create himself. Yet this was what the insane conspiracy that was in the process of seizing control of the French state was about to do.

The Declaration of the rights of man was to be the founding document of the French Republic which itself was to be the founding institution of the new order of things in the world. Its enumerated principles contained contained many high minded ideals about equality before the law and public accountability that had in fact already been a part of the Catholic worldview since antiquity, even if they were no longer being closely adhered to in the palaces of that corrupt age. But these were soon discarded by the revolutionaries and are therefore not relevant. However, the lack of even a cursory mention of God is stunning for the time and should have been a ringing bell in the ears of the French people warning them that trouble was coming. Why? Because the God Whom they had known for a thousand years, the God Who revealed Himself in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and the foundation of the Catholic Church who had been midwife to their nation is the Truth, and when the Truth is discarded then all that remains are lies and the father thereof.

I have avoided discussing the chronology of events surrounding the French Revolution to this point because I thought it best to first give evidence by the very ideas and acts of the revolutionaries themselves that tells us what their motives were. Was the French Revolution simply a local event? Was it the result simply of a random series of events that caused a crisis in French society and in the French state? Was it simply the result of long impersonal historical processes or some suppressed ‘general will’? Or was it something else?

I will state here my thesis that the French Revolution was not a random event that was simply the result of a lot of impersonal but natural historical forces. It was an organized and deliberate coup d’etat. The French Revolution was nothing but the launching of an all out war by an organized group who had hitherto remained hidden in dark corners on the relationship between God and man that prevailed in the societies north of the Mediterranean Sea since the conversion of Constantine almost fifteen centuries before. The Catholic Church was to be dispossessed of her authority and all traces of the accomplishments of the Church of Rome in human history were to be wiped from the mind of man. The Gospel was to be forgotten, and fallen man was to be deprived of the Sacraments and teaching of the Catholic Church and sent back to his misery like a dog returning to his vomit.

That is my thesis. It was the thought of Ven. Pope Pius VII when he wrote in paragraph 11 of Diu Satisof the great conspiracy. It was the constant warning of his successors. But is it true? The testimonies of the popes should open our eyes that this isn’t just some crackpot theory. The rapid eradication of the Catholic Church in the life of France in the period 1789-99 and the mass murder of priests starting in September, 1792 , which was the first of a long series of these atrocities that were to continue in Europe for 150 years until the Catholic Church lost all influence in the lives of the people who inhabited that continent following the Second World War, should open our eyes to the fact that there was something more going on here than just the inept fiscal policies of the French king or a few bad harvests. The violent destruction of the monarchy itself which was nothing but a visible reminder of the relationship between God and man is itself a clue to wider intentions. And lastly the invasion of Italy under the French Directory, the seizing of the Papal States, and the attempt to destroy the Papacy itself should tell us that the perpetrators of this revolution had concerns that were wholly other than the welfare of the French people.

So my plan for the present moment, God willing, is to go through the ideas brought forth by the revolution and by its activities that reveal an agenda far different than that which we are told of by the standard ‘histories’ of those times. After having laid that foundation I will then use evidence from works published at the close of the 1790s that indicates who these conspirators were and what their goals and means of acting were.

Man is not the center of the universe. The God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ is.

Please go to Confession and say three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

I start this post with those opening words of the document approved by the then recently invented French National Assembly on August 26, 1789 because they were the hinge point in the war of destruction that was then and still is being waged against the human race to this present day. Before that day these ideas had only been bandied about in the dark lairs of the lodges and in the darker minds of the likes of Voltaire who had sought to manipulate long existing institutions and power structures under a veil of secrecy and disguise in order to weaken those same institutions to pave the way for something else. This was the day that something else arrived. On this day the exaltation of man over God became the official policy of the French state i.e. the institution charged by God to govern the French people, the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church; a nation which owed its very existence to the Catholic Church was now throwing off both that Church and her divine Founder Himself, in order to follow their own designs.

Why do I say this? It all comes down to an adjective, a simple adjective. Oh, the demonic powers are so subtle and so cute! In order to understand better I will offer this translation of those above words published in the London Times on September 3, 1789:

The Representatives of the French people, constituted in National Assembly, considering that ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the Rights of Man are the sole causes of public misfortunes, and of the corruption of Governments

The neglect of the rights of man are the sole cause of all of our misfortunes eh? Only the rights of man? What about the rights of man’s divine Father and Creator? Doesn’t He have any say in the matter? And that is the whole point of this document: pushing the Creator out and putting man in his place, even to the point of capitalizing the ‘h’ in homme the French word for man. The name of God never comes up in this document, not once, which is astounding considering how religious the French people had been for more than a millennium and still were in that day. The Declaration of the rights of man has universally been treated and studied as a political document, but that is a mistake. This was fundamentally a religious declaration. It is the opening statement of a new order for the relationship of men with their God that had been long planned and now was to be put into effect by the public seizing of the institutions of the French state. Man was now to act as if God simply wasn’t there. And how has that worked for ya?

After the guardianship of the Church and of the Holy Father had been set aside by the Bourbon kings this madness of living without God and separating the human race from its common Father spread like wildfire among the fallen human beings who had been their subjects. This is the root of all of our evils. That the rights of man and his concerns should be the sole concern of man. It is the root of liberalism and materialism, of Marxism and Communism, of Hitlerism and Stalinism, of atheism and nihilism and of the despotism of despair that rules the life of contemporary man; that he vainly attempts to drive out with seductive empty pleasures and endless emotional stimulation that lead him only to the pit of Hell.

There is a particularly glorious passage in the fourteenth chapter of the Prophet Isaiah that deals with this way of thinking. I love the way that the Septuagint renders it so here I will offer my own NON AUTHORITATIVE translation:

And you said in your heart “I will mount to heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of heaven, I will dwell in the high places, on the mountain of the Covenant to the side of the north wind, I will mount above the clouds of glory, I will be like unto the Most High.” And now you shall come down to hell; to the foundations of the earth. Those who see will wonder at you and say “Is this the man who troubles the earth and shakes kingdoms?”

Please go to Confession and pray three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

If one reads a history of the French Revolution written in the last 150 years he will see many theories as to the cause of the events of 1789-1815. From poor harvests to inept fiscal policy to a weak monarch to a long suppressed ‘general will’ of the French nation to the Marxist fantasy that the bourgeoisie finally after a thousand years somehow discovered by some mysterious mystical force that it was destined to throw off the yoke of feudalism in order to establish the necessary step of capitalism on the road to its own destruction in the paradise of Communism.

There is some truth in all of these, except maybe the last two, but they don’t get to the nub of the matter. They really don’t answer certain questions. First of all the French Revolution was entirely about ideology, not economics, though France’s sorry economy after its disastrous financing of the American Revolutionary War provided an excuse. Someone had decided that all of the sudden there was going to be a radical and complete annihilation and reconstruction of society in France (and in the rest of Europe when they were able), right down to the number of days in a week and the names of the months. Who did this? Why?

We have voluminous testimony from a great number of witnesses, from Popes Clement XIII and Pius VI to the likes of Voltaire (who died, God rest his soul, a decade before the Revolution), that in the decades prior to the French Revolution a vast number of books with anonymous authors flooded Europe and France in particular from secret printing presses that sought to discredit the papacy and the Church and the authority of kings, and to weaken the morals of the peoples of Europe. This is an indisputable and essential fact yet it is never mentioned by modern historians. Maybe some of the books themselves are spoken about as part of a supposed general intellectual ferment, but the secret and suspicious manner of their production and distribution is entirely overlooked. Moreover we have the whole sad and sorry episode of the suppression of the Jesuits whose import has now been entirely forgotten.

All these things were deliberate steps taken by organized groups who had a certain end in mind. Thus I will posit that the previously mentioned theories of the origin of the events of 1789 should be discarded. At best they may explain timing, but other than that they are useless.

What happened in 1789 was simply the result of a conspiracy to seize the institutions of the French state and to use those institutions to spread an insane ideology that had been brewing in dark corners and has now come to dominate the earth: the exaltation of man over God which must of course be a prelude to man’s own (self) destruction. Do you believe this is possible? Well you ought to.

The world is rife with collusion and conspiracies. Conspiracies have always been there. The annals of history are filled with accounts of conspiracies to seize power in various states using various means for various reasons. Why should France in 1789 have been any different? Nor is it in fact any different now in this age where ‘the people’ (whoever they are) supposedly rule everything. What is a political party after all but an organized group who seek to manipulate the results of elections, often through quite deceptive means, in order to put themselves and their cronies in control of the governing institutions of a state?

But maybe you disagree that the aim and ambition of the goals of such a group. Maybe you don’t think that such a thing is even possible. I would beg to disagree. There is evidence, much evidence, that this is exactly what happened. In the coming posts I will attempt to show, by the events themselves, that the specific events that gave the French Revolution such an impact on the world had little to do with France and even less to do with the desires of the unfortunate souls who inhabited France at this time. Only later, God willing, will I go into who might have been responsible and the methods they used. We will start with the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Please go to Confession and say three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.